How long it would take to travel to the planets

Question

How long would it take to travel to venus(from earth)travelling 100kmph? how long from venus to mercury? mercury to neptune? neptune to uranus? uranus to saturn? saturn to mars? mars to jupiter? all going about 100kmph... or different if thats easier. THANK-YOU!

Answer

Hi Taylor, Yes, being in the USA, I have all the distances of the planets from the sun memorized...in miles. So I'll convert your 100 Km per hour to 61 miles per hour...which is really slow, that's like in a car.....some will take centuries at that slow speed. So all you have to do is memorize, from the sun: Mercury 36 million miles Venus 67 million miles Earth 93 million Mars 141 million Jupiter 484 million Saturn 887 million Uranus 1.6 billion Neptune 2.6 billion Pluto (not a planet but one of the largest members of the Kuiper asteroid belt) 3.6 billion miles.

So all one has to do is subtract to get the actual distance, then divide by 61 miles per hour to get the time in hours. For instance, from Earth to Venus is 93-67 = 26 million miles, and 26000000 divided by 61 = 377049 hours. (There are 8760 hours in a year of 365 days.) 377049 hours divided by 8760 hours per year = about 43 years. (and that's one of the shortest distances you gave me!) So it will take multi-centuries for some of those outer planet distances. And realize, this is all assuming that the planets are 'stationary' but they aren't...with a real trip, you'd have to figure first where the planet is going to be when you get there, and then follow a slow curved path to that position...so the times are going to be even longer in real life. Well, I did one of them for you...you now know the procedure so you can crank out the rest of them on your calculator. (Whether you use metric or English system, the times will all come out the same, because a second is a second...in both systems). Hope this helps, Clear Skies, Tom Whiting Erie, PA USA